Thanks for that. Does anyone have any opinions on or experience with KVM as an alternative to VirtualBox or VMware?
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Grant LindsayNov 4 '11 at 21:04

Just to come back to this, I ended up (twice, now) installing Ubuntu desktop, 64-bit -- first 12.04 onto a Dell laptop, then 14.04 pre-installed on a System76 laptop. Then used QEMU/Virt to host various other OSs, including Windows XP and 7 desktops, and 2000, 2003, 2008 servers. (If I remember correctly.) Overall, very happy with the configuration.
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Grant LindsayAug 7 '14 at 16:17